What's your local history?

[Ãskallin]

I live in a cute little fishing town in the North-east corner of Iceland called Vopnafjörður, it has a population of 726, of which I know all (funny fealing of knowing everybody from your hometown).
It was said to have held the place of one of the landvættir (landguardians) of Iceland, the dragon.
Apparantly it lies dormant in the mountain obove my house, ready to burst forward in defense of Iceland in case of it be threatened(I am not sure of it cause we could have used a fire spewing, airborne lizard in the codwar). It was settled in the 870's by a man called Eyvindur Vopni (after which the fjord and the town are named). There was extensive fighting between the warring chiefs in the 9th, 10th and 11th century but after down it kinda cooled down and nothing of note basicly has happened since then. It has a very old church settlement, wivh is being excavated now, they have founds heaps of old stuff from the settlement age.
It also had a danish merchant in the years of the monopoly (an nice danish invention which kept the Icelandic people so poor that in bad years they were forced to a diet of saddles and snow). The house of the merchant is now a tourist information centre (for the 2 tourists a year who come here and generally are lost and trying to get to Reykjavik).



At the moment though I am situated in Hawera, New Zealand as an exchange student. About that towns history I am not really certain about, except that it was burnt down a couple of timesAn view of the hamlet

[Henrik]

Bolded the parts which are suposedly "famous". Though some of them are rather dubious claims to fame...

I live in the city of Lund in southern Sweden.
T'was founded around year 1000 in what was then Danish Scania, suposedly as a part in the unification process with Denmark.
During the early middle ages Lund was home to the archbishop of Scandinavia. In the early 1100s Lunds cathedral was enacted

It also features Scandinavias oldest school "Katedralskolan"/The Cathedral School which happens to be where I went for my secondary education

During the late 1600s Sweden conquered Scania and as a part of the wars settling this the battle of Lund was fought. This battle was one of the bloodiest in the history of Scandinavia with very high casualties (about 50% of the men involved) on both sides.

As part of a general Swedyfiyng process afterwards a university was founded in Lund which still stands today and has grown to be (atleast according to their own homepage) Scandinavias largest.



The city itself isn't very big however, with just about 100 000 inhabitants (45 000 of which are students of the university). This means that today the city is very much a university city. Which has it's benefits and it's drawbacks...

There is some industry but not much. Tetra Pak was founded here and Sony Ericsson and Astra Zeneca have parts of their development here.
Other than this the University Hospital is one of the main employers.


Katedralskolan :

[Buck Birdseed]

Umeå has more-or-less no record of permanent settlement until the late middle ages, and even then it was just set up as a trading post with the nomadic sami living in the area. It's named after the river, the Ume, which runs through town and whose name apparently originates in ancient norse Uma "The Screamer".

It was extensively settled and given city privilidges by Gustavus Adolphus in the mid-17th century and lived a fairly quiet existence until 1888 (only ransacked and destroyed a couple of times by marauding russians, in 1720 and 1809). In 1888 a fire destroyed the whole city. Reimagined as the sparse, lowly-built, birch-tree-lined city we know today, it was quickly rebuilt in great wooden 1890s style and still retains much of the character of those times.

In 1965 the still relatively mid-sized city had a university placed in it by the government, the only one in northern sweden. There was an immediate influx of students which has never stopped since. The city has grown explosively and is today one of the fastest-growing in the country. Just a few years ago it passed Sundsvall as the biggest city in the north, and it's attracted major industries and cultural centres like flies after the university was built.

Which is all very interesting 'cause York, where I used to live, remained sleepily bourgeois even though it had a university built around the same time. Maybe it's Umeå's relative isolation...

[Jon Miller]

Well, currently I am in the vicinity of Jamestown and Yorktown in Southern Virginia.

I haven't really experienced in much, my history interest has been on the backburner recently.

JM

[Wycoff]

Originally posted by Jon Miller
Well, currently I am in the vicinity of Jamestown and Yorktown in Southern Virginia.

I haven't really experienced in much, my history interest has been on the backburner recently.

JM

You need to make a day trip to Williamsburg and Jamestown. You're only 15 miles away.

[Will9]

I forgot to mention, Evansville hosts the second largest street festival.

[Buck Birdseed]

..you've ever seen? In the state? Ever? What?

[Sir Og]

My hometown is Stara Zagora.

There has been a settlement in this place for over 8000 years. We have the oldest preserved neolithic dwelings here and the oldes preserved copper mine in Europe.
In Thracian times the city was called Beroe (meaning "iron"). Apparently this has been a mining area in the antiquity. Nowdays there is no mining in the area.
Under the Roman Empire, the town was renamed in honor of emperor Trajan to Augusta Trajana. We have a lot of structures preserved from the Roman city. Pretty much the whole town is preserved about 2-3 meters below the current ground level. The baths and the forum are excavated and in the summer there are opera shows there.
The town became part of Bulgaria for the first time under khan Tervel. The whole Zagora area was given to Bulgaria as a reward for helping Byzantium defeat the Arabs.
The city changed hands (between Bulgaria and Byzantium) a lot throughout history. In 8th century AD the city was renamed by the Byzantine empress Irina to Irinopolis. Later while part of Byzantium) it was renamed to Vereya.
In the year 1122 Stara Zagora was the site of a battle between Byzantine Emperor John II Komnenos and an invading Pecheneg army, the Battle of Beroia. The Pechenegs suffered a crushing defeat at the hands of John's Byzantine army, and many of the captives were settled as foederati within the Byzantine frontier.
Stara Zagora was conquered by the Ottomans in 1371. It was renamed to Eski Zagra (old Zagore fortress).
During the last Russo-Turkish war (wich led to the liberation of Bulgaria from Ottoman rule) Stara Zagora was burnt down by the Turks. There were several large battles in the area during that war. The population at that time dropped from 23 thousand to 15.5 thousand people. The Chech architect Lubor Bayer (sp?) was hired to make a city plan for rebuilding of the city. He designed the town with a grid of perpendicular straight streets.
The nicest buildings that we have now are the new and the old Opera houses.
There a lot of revolutionaries (19th century), poets, writers and singers from Stara Zagora but they are mostly with national importance/fame.
The local football club Beroe FC won the championship back in 1986 and it seems unlikely that they are going to repeat this feat in the forseeable future. One of the all time national football team leading goalscorers Petar Jekov is from stara Zagora.

[Will9]

Originally posted by Buck Birdseed
..you've ever seen? In the state? Ever? What?

Could you question be any clearer.

[Makahlua]

I'm out in Garland, one of Dallas' bigger (but actually rather quiet!) suburbs. There were settlers around here since the 1850's but it was actually a dispute over who should get the local post office station that got the two communites of Embree and Duck Creek to combine into Garland in 1887. It's mostly been a mix of agriculture and medium-light industry with the exceptions of aircraft plants built in WW2. One of those became the local Kraft Foods plant where my Mom first worked, I know they used to locally make some of the BBQ & dressings there, as well as marshmallows in the fall, and also caramels before halloween. Nothing like just made yesterday boxes of caramels! (An employee perk in case you wondered.)

Population was just over 10K in 1950, between post war population boom, and the growing amount of commuters since the 70's, the population is now ~215K, when we moved here from a nother suburb in 1984, it was barely 100k, to give you an idea how much it's grown. I can remember when the neighborhood my house is in was nothign but some fields... we were practically out in the boonies in 84', but now the city's caught up and there's only a few fields left

As far as jobs go, most people are commuting all across Dallas, and especially to the suburb next door I used to live in (Richardson) due to that place having a telecom industry boom over the past decade +. Some of it's spilled over into Garland too, and a lot of the old industrial type places are abandoned or are being dozed and converted into office spaces. And I can pretty much guarantee you that until the 70's or later it was almost -all- white, it's only been more recently that we've gotten a influx of Asians (mostly Vietnamese oddly) and Hispanics.

Claims to fame?

-country singer LeAnn Rimes was born and raised here (she came and saw Titanic at the movie theatre I sued to work at!)

-We're part of the inspiration for "King of the Hill", since Mike Judge also grew up around here. this show - because if I don't have some of those people in my own family I sure grew up around them

-and we're home to 3DRealms, better known as 'those guys that still haven't finished Duke Nukem Forever'

Humm, guess that's quite a bit for a quiet town